Tuesday, 28 January 2014

Arts and Craft Supplies - Organized for the time being

Remember back in the summer when I decided to try and strip a million coats of paint off a dresser? Then I got fed up with it and just kind of called it quits until I decided what to do with it? It was hanging out in the garage looking like this...

Then after I spent some time sanding the shit out of it, it looked like this...

Which was when I decided that I was done with sanding and it just needed to be something functional again.

Meet Vivian's arts and crafts cupboard.

It worked well for awhile. I liked that it was up high so she couldn't get into it without me, and I liked that I could close it so it was out of sight, out of mind. However, after she got a bunch of new Play-Doh for Christmas, getting something out of the cupboard was becoming quite the obstacle course. Tired of things falling on my head, I decided to bring the dresser into the kitchen.

I was boring and just painted it white so it would go with the trim in the kitchen. I'm thinking about repainting the kitchen, so I didn't want to do anything too crazy and have it not match down the line.

Now there's a whole little Vivian corner in the kitchen, so it's nice to keep it all together.

This kitchen is such a weird layout - it's so big, but there's so much wasted space. Having the small table in here really frees up a lot of room for stuff like this though, so I'm not complaining too much.

I cannot believe that everything in that one little cupboard ended up filling the entire dresser.

The next drawer has paint, more markers, colouring books, and the world's largest package of construction paper (hooray for back to school stuff from Costco!)

Play-Doh drawer number one. I like to keep those Folgers coffee containers for Vivian's stuff. They ended up being the perfect size to fit in the drawer to hold all of her little tools and containers. That way when she plays with it I can just grab the one she wants instead of having to dig through a huge pile.

And the bottom drawer has her bigger Play-Doh sets

I couldn't figure out a good spot for her painting smocks (she has four, for some reason) so I just stuck them in a basket on top.

I love this dresser, and I'm so glad that I finally found a space for it to be put to good use! Now if only I could stop buying art supplies when I see them on clearance maybe this thing could stay organized for longer than ten minutes.